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Showing posts from December, 2018

BBC's News' "Who is your Olympic Body Match?"

This interactive website from the BBC will match your student, using their height, gender, and weight, to their Rio Olympic body match. You enter your height, weight, age, and select your gender. It matches you with the athlete who is the most like you. It also provides good examples for distribution, and where you fall on the distribution, for Olympic athletes. I think it also gets students thinking about regression models. After you enter your data, the page returns information about where you fall on the distribution histogram for Olympic athletes by height, weight, and age for your gender. Then, the website returns your topic matches: How to use in class: 1) What other IVs could you collect to determine best sport match (DV)? Family income (I had access to soccer growing up, but not dressage horses)? Average temperature of hometown (My high school had a skiing club but not a beach volleyball club)? This gets your students thinking about multiple regression ...

A bunch of pediatricians swallowed Lego heads. You can use their research to teach the basics of research methods and stats.

As a research-parent-nerd joke before Christmas, six doctors swallowed Lego heads and recorded how long it took to pass the Lego heads. Why? As to inform parents about the lack of danger associated with your kid swallowing a tiny toy.  I encourage you to use it as a class example because it is short, it describes its research methodology very clearly, using a within-subject design, has a couple of means, standard deviations, and even a correlation. TL;DR: https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/dont-forget-the-lego/ In greater detail: Note the use of a within subject design. They also operationalized their DV via the SHAT (Stool Hardness and Transit) scale. *Yeah. So here is the Bristol Stool Chart  mentioned in the above excerpt. Please don't click on the link if your are eating or have a sensitive stomach. Research outcomes, including mean and standard deviations: An example of a non-significant correlation, with the SHAT score on the y-axi...

Naro's "Why can't anyone replicate the scientific studies from those eye-grabbing headlines?"

Maki Naro created a terrific comic strip detailing the replication, where it came from, where we are, and possible solutions.  You can use it in class to introduce the crisis and solutions. I particularly enjoy the overall tone: Hope is not lost. This is a time of change in statistics and methodology that will ultimately make science better. A few highlights: *History of science, including the very first research journal (and why the pressure to get published has lead to bad science) *Illustration of some statsy ways to bend the truth in science  *References big moments in the Replication Crisis  *Discusses the crisis AND solutions (PLOS, SIPS, COS)

Coolness Graphed by RC Jones

They are bar graphs. And they are funny.